Stephanie Comilang
Search for Life I, 2024

Two-channel video installation, color, sound
20 min 20 sec
Co-commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Sharjah Art Foundation
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Stephanie Comilang is a Filipino-Canadian artist based in Berlin. Born in Toronto in 1980, her documentary-based works craft narratives that explore how mobility, labor, and capital shape culture and society on a global scale. Describing her films as “science-fiction documentaries,” Comilang combines facts and speculative elements to investigate themes of diaspora, survival, and intergenerational memory. 

Search for Life premiered at Comilang’s first solo exhibition in Spain, held at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2024. This two-channel video installation juxtaposes the migration of monarch butterflies with human diaspora, drawing parallels between natural and human movements across generations and geographies. It forms part of a series exploring global maritime shipping and the indispensable yet overlooked role of Filipino seafarers, presented alongside the mythic journey of monarch butterflies migrating thousands of kilometers.

Filmed with a sensitivity to layered narratives, Search for Life intertwines stories from a diverse array of characters: the historian Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos; butterfly expert Jade Aster T. Badon; and two former Filipino seafarers, Michael John Díaz, a florist, and Joar Songcuya, a painter. Their accounts are interwoven with the voice of a monarch butterfly, creating a symphonic narrative of migration and survival, informed by collective memory and transgenerational resilience.

Presented on a large LED screen and a projection facing it, the work traces historic maritime routes like the Manila galleons, which connected the Philippines and Mexico during the Spanish colonial period. These routes are revisited not only as frameworks of colonial exploitation but as sites of cultural exchange and transformation. The monarch butterfly, whose migratory journey spans generations, becomes a metaphor that reinforces themes of endurance and interconnectedness, as well as the intrinsic ties between nature and human history.

Comilang describes this work as her most ambitious yet, reflecting on “overlapping histories, timeframes, and characters, both human and nonhuman,” to question notions of mobility and belonging. By merging archival research, interviews, and speculative perspectives of both people and animals, the work extends beyond documentary filmmaking into a poetic meditation on global interdependence and the persistent search for life.